Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update

It would be nice if it was again possible to run it in current Mac OS. The original Half life still lists Mac OS but with incompatible information (newer versions of Steam require recent versions, but HL only runs on old 32 bit OSX)

It should work in Wine, although I haven't tested this update yet.

(disclaimer: I work for CodeWeavers, we sell CrossOver which should be a great and easy way to play)

edit: tested out the 20th anniversary update on M2 Pro, it works great!

All, or at least most of Valve's games used to run natively on Mac, and now they don't (even on Intel Macs)

Running native or emulated doesn’t really matter if the performance is good enough.

Better translation layers are what made the Steam Deck possible.

What did you do to get it to run? I didn’t download load it because of the warnings. Just run in Rosetta?

Good enough doesn't mean optimal, though. Every layer adds a performance penalty and that's how we end up in situations where we have layers and layers of abstraction eventually making all programs slow even on ever increasing hardware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill's_law

Are these new windows releases also 64 bit or still 32 bit?

I used CrossOver to install (Windows) Steam, then downloaded/ran (Windows) HL2 from there

Still 32-bit

Is this a problem Valve should invest in fixing because it's an issues caused by them, or a problem Apple created for not caring about backwards compatibility on MacOS the same way Microsoft does on Windows?

If Apple doesn't care about backwards compatibility on their platform, why should Valve or other developers be burdened with the added cost, especially on a platform with small market share that won't drive many sales?

Shouldn't be a problem. Windows 11 and Wine can run most 32 bit Windows apps just fine. I managed to get Winamp 2.6 working on Windows 11.

The reason I asked is that macOS no longer runs 32-bit apps natively. So If they haven’t taken the time to make these 64 bit, there’s no real hope for a Mac native port again.

In fact, Windows gamers are using DXVK to reduce overhead.

One needs to realise graphics APIs have historically not been terribly efficient.

Amen. I didn't understand why Apple is one of the only companies that gets to break backward compatibility, and escape all blame when stuff breaks. It always seems to be put on the software developer to update with whatever Apple's new requirements are, even when it's older software (or ancient)!

I just installed* it. It run well, although I don’t recommend playing it with a Magic Mouse.

* I first installed Whisky, a Wine/Game Porting toolkit/app thingy (https://getwhisky.app). Then I installed Steam for Windows inside Whisky, then downloaded HL2. The download was a little bit hiccup-y, but it worked. Testplay of HL2 was great, apart from the mouse.

How do you know that those graphics APIs have not been efficient?

Benchmarks.

There was a reason Mantle/Vulkan came to be.